Report: Kristen Clarke organized conference that championed cop-killers

According to Fox News, Kristen Clarke, Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, organized a conference at which left-wing activists championed cop-killers and backed the freeing of violent criminals. Fox News reports:

According to a previously unseen university transcript obtained by the American Accountability Foundation and given to Fox News, Kristen Clarke was a critical leader and organizer of the controversial Race-ing Justice Conference while she was a student a Columbia Law School in April 1999

The transcript points to Clarke as the event organizer multiple times, as many speakers thanked her and other organizers for bringing the conference together. Clarke was previously reported as only being a contact for the conference.

What was the conference Clarke organized about? It was mainly about freeing cop-killers and radical extremists:

The conference organized left-leaning students and anti-government activists in their shared support of freeing death row inmates, whom they referred to as “political prisoners.” The list included people convicted for a wide array of crimes, including convicted cop-killers Mumia Abu-Jamal, Mutulu Shakur, Sundiata Acoli, and Tom Manning, in addition to other radical extremists.

The convicted criminals the conference equated to “political prisoners” included Assata Shakur — who was convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper, escaped from prison and remains on the FBI’s Most Wanted list — and Susan Rosenberg, who was convicted for transporting multiple illegal firearms and over 740 pounds of explosives.

Rosenberg was also a member of the American communist terrorist group, the May 19th Communist Organization, that bombed the US Capitol on Nov. 7, 1983.

I guess attacks on the Capitol, the “temple of our democracy” — didn’t bother Clarke much back then.

One of the speakers was Safiya Bukhari, founder of the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition. Bukhari downplayed the Holocaust, saying it “was only 6 million Jews killed in the camps and prisons of Germany and Poland.”

Clarke must have been comfortable with that. A few years earlier, she had invited a notorious anti-Semite to speak at Harvard and then endorsed his attacks on Jews.

Clarke’s defenders may argue that her organizing activities in law school shouldn’t be held against her two decades later. However, I doubt that, for purposes of high-ranking Justice Department nominees, there’s a statute of limitation on supporting cop-killers.

Moreover, Clarke held the college writings of a Trump nominee against that nominee. Law school activism is more relevant than college writings.

Accordingly, Senators should hold Clarke’s celebration of cop killers against her. They should add it to the list of reasons not to confirm her.

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